Terriforming Mars. Scifi fantasy. This isn't "Total Recall"

On Friday, August 10, 2018 at 2:24:03 PM UTC-7, Anonymous Remailer (austria) wrote:
In article
On Tue, 31 Jul 2018 22:33:57 -0700 (PDT),

wrote:

The original "Total Recall" the remake was s---. But the idea of forming a new atmosphere on Mars is lunacy.

https://phys.org/news/2018-07-mars-t...echnology.html

Read Robinson's Mars Trilogy for a good treatment of what is
scientifically possible, even reasonable, for terraforming Mars. It
isn't fantasy, and it isn't beyond our scientific or technical means.
That doesn't mean doing it anytime in the near future makes much
sense. But that's a matter of social policy, not scientific ability.

The oxygen leaked off the planet what, a billion years ago? How will they keep it there now?

It needs to be constantly replaced. But the leak rate is low- how long
do we need to keep it there? It's not like there are going to be any
humans in millions of years, and it takes hundreds of millions of
years to lose significant amounts of oxygen.

Mars has no magnetic field and relatively weak gravity. Could you
even add oxygen as fast as it would be lost? And once you got
enough oxygen there the atmosphere would still be too thin for a
human to breathe.

"Terraforming" on a planet like Mars is going to have to mean just
digging out underground warrens and pressurizing them with
beathable air.

Sending humans to Mars is like , adding dinosaur to todays earth echo system!